Postalicious Excerpts

This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on January 20, 2009). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

For some time now I’ve been using the Postalicious WordPress plug-in to automatically create the link posts aggregating stuff that I toss into my delicous account. As I’ve been tweaking and fine-tuning the templates for the new version of the site, though, I (re-)discovered one minor annoyance.

I like to use post excerpts for my archive pages (more detail than simply listing the title, easier to skim through archives using the full body for every post), but Postalicious didn’t have a way to set an excerpt. Each Postalicious post would then end up with an autogenerated excerpt, which tend to trail away in the middle of the first link in the post, leaving something like this:

Links for January 15th through January 16th
Sometime between January 15th and January 16th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
no news is bad news: An expression of the value of local news, especially in Seattle, especially in these uncertain times. Cool Stuff: Olly Moss’s Poster Remakes: 21-year old UK artist Olly Moss is probably best known for his […]

It works, but it’s not pretty.

A couple days ago I dropped a line to Postalicious’ creator, asking it might be possible to add excerpt templates in a future revision. He wrote back to say that he’d work on that when he got a chance…and just one day later, version 2.6 of Postalicous was posted with support for excerpt templates!

Nicely done, and very quick response. I’m impressed! Postalicious is all updated, and from here on out, link posts shouldn’t look so cluttered in my archive pages. Now to see about tweaking the excerpts on all those earlier posts….